Hey insomniacs, Zeo opens up its wireless sleep device to developers

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Zeo Inc., the company behind a $200 Zeo Personal Sleep Coach wireless sleep device, plans to open its API so other people can build hardware add-ons and write apps for the gizmo. Since it’ll be the first consumer sleep product with an API, the news should come as a minor relief for the folks suffering from insomnia and sleeping disorders, and will no doubt delight developers of health and fitness software.

Available in the second half of 2010, the API will let developers access nightly sleep data captured by the device and build software that monitors cause and effect patterns between sleep and activities such as dieting, athletic training, and job productivity.

For those wondering, the Zeo device consists of a headband that records your sleep wirelessly and a gadget that looks like an alarm clock that interprets raw data to tell you how you slept. The solution pairs with online tools for creating personalized email-based coaching with tips and assessments.

Sleep data exposed to developers includes total sleep time, amount of deep sleep, amount of REM sleep, number of times woken, and a cumulative measure of one night of sleep. Newton, Massachusetts-based Zeo confirmed that DailyBurn and RunKeeper both pledged to integrate their body metric systems with the platform. The former will enable users of its body metrics tracking to better understand the relationship between sleep and their weight loss while the latter will track users’ activity and compare against nutrition, weight and sleep.

Christian’s Opinion

Many people don’t sleep well and millions suffer from a lack of restful sleep. It’s not just folks that put in long hours or late night bloggers like myself. I’ve been battling with my sleeping disorder for nearly a decade, tackling the issue from many angles, including meditation and sleeping pills. Having been an avid user of the Pzizz apps, I realized insomnia and exhaustion could be partially addressed with software. After all, our brain is kinda computer that responds to Neuro Linguistic Programming, the science that explains how language patterns program our minds and form our views.

But while the apps like Pzizz tranquilize your mind into a deep sleep mode, they cannot tell you what’s happening with your brain during sleep. That’s where solutions like the Zeo fill the gap. The API announcement opens up a market for a wide variety of possibilities. For instance, fitness firms could write sleep fitness software. An iPhone app also pops into mind. Dock connector access in iPhone 3 software and the Zeo API make possible an imaginary iPhone app that could retrieve sleeping data from the Zeo gadget wirelessly and graph it out on the phone, allowing you to zoom in on the chart, get a detailed assessment of your sleep, personalized tips, and so on.